What a web

Chieftain editorial

Published: July 8, 2013;Last modified: July 8, 2013 10:58PM

THE MORE that Americans see what’s in Obamacare, the more they don’t like it.

Take young adults. When the individual mandate kicks in next year, it appears that many of them will decide to pay the prescribed $100 penalty rather than buy health insurance. And to these so-called “young invincibles,” this makes a lot more sense than paying $3,000 or so a year for coverage.

We doubt the Nancy Pelosi crowd ever thought that young people wouldn’t march lockstep to the dictates of the health insurance law, which was cobbled together behind closed doors without a whit of open debate.

Health insurance carriers have been banking on being able to sign up healthy young adults to offset the costs of providing insurance to older Americans who start using health care — sometimes very expensive care. The law skews higher pricing toward these younger people.

Who’d have thought they would respond this way? Not the Democrats who pushed through a law also that requires thousands of pages of rules and regulations being wrought by unelected, faceless bureaucrats in Washington.

Implementing those provisions is proving rough sledding for the administration, so it is now waiving some of them — for how long nobody knows. In addition to waiving the employer mandate, the Department of Health and Human Services has announced it will no longer attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify the information consumers provide is accurate.

People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not provide federally approved health benefits. But with the business waiver in effect, HHS says it can’t ask the insurance “exchanges” to certify who qualifies either.

HHS says it will develop “a more robust verification process” — some day — but the result starting in October could be millions of people getting subsidies who don’t legally qualify. Is this a great country, or what?

So we have young people who will decide not to buy insurance to help pay for older patients, a waiver on the employer mandate to provide health care or pay huge fines and a waiver on individuals providing accurate information to be eligible for subsidies. Such are (some of) the unintended consequences of legislation that was not thoroughly vetted and yet passed in an effort to get all Americans dependent on the nanny state. Welcome to Obamaland.

This editorial appeared in the July 9, 2013, edition of The Pueblo Chieftain.